(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)

To start off, I’m not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don’t care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.

So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.

Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, “How to record Netflix shows” & “Why can’t you screen record Netflix”. THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.

I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.

Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.

  • bruce965@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    2 days ago

    You should install Rethink and see how much garbage your phone constantly transmits and receives. And this is not even a kernel-level firewall, so who knows how much data Google actually exfiltrates…

    I don’t know about a constant audio stream, nor about keywords, but I noticed that Google Keyboard sends out some data every time you type anything. It’s not even that subtle.

    • The 8232 Project@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      2 days ago

      If anything, I love GrapheneOS for its “Network” permission toggle. It’s nice knowing that my keyboard (or any other unnecessary apps) can’t phone home.

      • bruce965@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        2 days ago

        GrapheneOS is certainly on my wishlist too, but Pixels are quite pricey. I guess Rethink is the poor man’s version. Just a per-app firewall.

        • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          2 days ago

          Maybe Divest/Lineage could be an option instead. Although you have to choose a device wisely (and even among supported ones, some have trouble unlocking the bootloader), there is a chance you’d find a suitable cheaper one.

          Personally no regrets spending $300 on a Pixel 7a but still painful to hand over this much.